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	<title>Omid Farivar</title>
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	<description>HCI Masters student doin&#039; work at Michigan.</description>
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		<title>iDance</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:53:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Omid</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Other Work]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[iDance and iDance 2 are essentially multiplayer variants of the classic Konami game, Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). I worked on the former as a Step Data Creator for three years. Essentially, I was given MP3s of songs that were going to be in the game and used StepMania, an open source variant of DDR, to create five different difficulty levels of steps per song. I had full creative control in making the steps. However, I was told to create a suggested difficulty level upon downloading the MP3 (i.e. to keep the game&#8217;s difficulty at a nice bell curve). If your Google-fu is strong, you&#8217;ll have noted that Positive Gaming, the creators of iDance, are based in Europe. I didn&#8217;t live in Europe for three years while I worked for them, nor did I ever visit them in order to get the job. At my &#8220;peak&#8221; in 2008, I was the 4th best In the Groove player in the world. I was active on community forums and had made over 30 &#8220;simfiles&#8221; (creating step data to songs of my own choosing) that thousands of people had downloaded and played. Although I can&#8217;t post the actual files for my portfolio, I can post a teaser of the actual game! :) Enjoy.]]></description>
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		<title>Molly Maid</title>
		<link>http://omidf.net/molly-maid/</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:43:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Omid</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[University of Michigan Work]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[This project was very important to me as it was the first time I was doing pure UX design at school. Other classes required design as part of larger projects, but weren&#8217;t solely focused on designing. My group and I worked great together and Molly Maid was a fantastic client. First, we interviewed our stakeholders at the company to figure out what exactly they wanted out of a potential iPad app. After two meetings, we understood that the iPad app should: Eliminate the need for estimators to do paper &#38; pencil math when estimating a final price Improve the professional image of Molly Maid Engage customers through the use of photos, testimonials, and videos Remind estimators of key sales pitches or actions when with the customer After our stakeholder  interviews, my team and I moved forward with interviewing users. Our users included: executives, trainers, franchise owners, and in-home estimators—everyone we foresaw using the app. From this research, we developed a set of three personas with scenarios to help guide our future design. We then conducted a thorough competitive analysis to see what Molly Maid&#8217;s competitors were doing on both the technology and estimation fronts. We also chose to look at various iPad apps that performed many of the actions Molly Maid desired from this future app. Finally, after about four weeks of research, it was time to get designing. During the first meeting, we were at a total standstill. Where should we start? I started off leading our group in a design brainstorm, since I did get some experience as a designer over the summer at Blizzard Entertainment. We all independently created lo-fi designs and came together to discuss them. I moderated the discussion and we embraced the IDEO idea of &#8220;embracing crazy ideas&#8221; so that better ones would follow (and they did!). We then developed use cases as a team, split the use cases up among ourselves, and got to wireframing using Axure RP Pro. After several iterations, we began to finalize our design and create higher and higher fidelity mockups in Axure RP Pro. In the end, we stitched all of our wireframes together using Adobe Fireworks and used the TAP framework to create a very high fidelity, &#8220;interactive&#8221; prototype. Screenshots shamelessly lifted from my teammate, Evan Kerrigan. Our final prototype is available online! Please contact me if you&#8217;d like to try it out.]]></description>
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		<title>NEES Project Warehouse</title>
		<link>http://omidf.net/nees-project-warehouse/</link>
		<comments>http://omidf.net/nees-project-warehouse/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:24:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Omid</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[University of Michigan Work]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[I worked with NEES as a client while enrolled in SI 622: Evaluation of Systems and Services. My teammates and I performed an in-depth usability study of a certain part of their website (the Project Warehouse) and provided several recommendations on how to improve it based on months of user research. First, I created an interaction map in Omnigraffle to show the various pages of the project warehouse and how they were interlinked. The actual deliverable can be downloaded here. Next, we interviewed several users to get an idea of how the system is currently used. These users ranged from PIs (professors with PhDs who run labs), staff (IT, etc), as well as graduate students in the earthquake engineering program at the University of Michigan. From these interviews, I created personas and matching scenarios to help guide the rest of our research and recommendations. This deliverable can be downloaded here. The next method we employed was a competitive analysis. We wanted to make sure NEEShub was offering everything it should to its userbase. In a normal work setting, a competitive analysis would not have been very useful for our client&#8230;but we had to do it for a grade for our class anyways. The analysis wasn&#8217;t completely useless, as we found that only one direct competitor existed to NEEShub. This, in fact, puts less pressure on NEEShub to provide a positive experience for its users, since users have very little choice but to use the project warehouse. This made our research even more important! Download our competitive analysis here. To follow up, I conducted a heuristic review of the website using Nielsen&#8217;s ten web design heuristics. Fifty-five findings were discovered by our group as a whole. We then met and defended our own personal findings to narrow it down to the seven most important issues. The report can be found here. Finally, we conducted user tests—both in person and remotely. This was the first time I tested using WebEx/Skype and I had a lot of fun. It&#8217;s much harder to follow the user as the researcher, but it&#8217;s easier for the user since they can be using the interface in their native &#8220;habitat&#8221; if you will. :) Our report can be found here.]]></description>
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